There’s a trend on YouTube at the moment for videos in which older people give advice. They speak directly to camera, frankly and without pretension. One can almost sense the care home staff hovering in the background, coaxing their barely extant charges into making one last testament of their time on Earth. The videos have titles such as ‘Things I’d tell my 30-year-old self’, ‘Harsh realities of being an 85-year-old woman’, ‘A girl and a woman talk about life’, ‘Lessons learned’ and ‘How to deal with loneliness.’
The commenters below the videos respond, largely, with gratitude and a surprising lack of trollery. ‘I’m terrified of dying,’ one commenter writes. ‘I fear many things, but nothing scares me as much as death does. I’ve been living a very rough life, and I can’t guarantee that I’ll be in Heaven when I die.’ (Note to editor: this may be Donald Trump.) ‘I miss being young… I suffer from depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, and a variety of health problems.’ Others say: ‘This was one of the best videos I ever saw, I am in tears right now’ or ‘Tell someone you love them, today’ or ‘Oh my goodness this is wonderful. I will share this and I will watch it over and over.’ ‘This is genuine and true. So much loneliness in the world. You gave the best advice that we need to hear.’
But of course, nothing here is exactly what it seems. The wrinklies in the vids are not old at all: they are freshly hatched hyper-realistic AI worms. They are not here to give you advice. They are here to harvest clicks and gain ad revenue.
The comments below the videos are bots. Or at least they’re often bots: sometimes they’re not-bots. By clicking on them you can see how long ago the posters joined YouTube, and some signed up five, ten years ago, before Shoggoth with his thousand eyes had been summoned from the depths to live among us.
If, head spinning at the reality of what cannot be real, you open the description to one of the videos, and scroll down, way down, to the section where it says ‘Beware of the Leopard’, you will find a disclaimer such as the following: ‘This content is for educational and inspirational purposes only. The stories shared on this channel are fictionalised to provide life advice and wisdom through storytelling. The person in this video is AI-generated, not a real individual. All visuals are AI-created representative images. Subscribe for more life wisdom from people who’ve already been through it. Important stories. Real takeaways. No pretending. No regrets left unsaid.’
No pretending? But didn’t you just say that the 99-Year-Old Nutrition Professor Giving Eight Keys to Longevity is not actually 99 or a professor or a human being? What about his advice? Should I seek a second opinion?
These AI grannies and grandads distil a lifetime’s experience but have never lived lives
Naturally we should have seen this coming but only one group of people got it right and they weren’t even intellectuals: they were pulp sci-fi novelists. Perhaps the greatest of them was Philip K. Dick. The Granosphere is deeply Dickian. Way back in the 50s and 60s, Dick predicted a future in which nothing is real and people are endlessly manipulable. ‘That’s the premise I start from in my work,’ he said in an interview, ‘that so-called “reality” is a mass delusion that we’ve all been required to believe for reasons totally obscure.’
The science-fiction author and programmer Charles Platt wrote: ‘All of [Dick’s] work starts with the basic assumption that there cannot be one, single, objective reality. Everything is a matter of perception. The ground is liable to shift under your feet. A protagonist may find himself living out another person’s dream, or he may enter a drug-induced state that actually makes better sense than the real world, or he may cross into a different universe completely.’ Thus in We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (Dick had a genius for titles) the hero’s illusory life conceals a reality which turns out to be so disturbing that he agrees to swap it for another illusion – which then turns out to be real. Appearance conceals reality, which is in fact appearance concealing reality.
Why is this so reprehensible, so vile, so disturbing? Perhaps because the AI grannies and grandads tell us what really matters but they’re not really real. They distil a lifetime’s experience but have never lived lives. It’s not like the cinema or the theatre, where you buy a ticket and expect to be told stories. They’re here to deceive. There are no lessons except the most important lesson, which is not learned at all: people with computers are trying to steal your attention and, indirectly, your cash. In the future, these people may have the tools to steal it directly by convincingly impersonating someone you trust. The future they cryptically warn you of is not that you may be lonely, may have a stroke, may die, but that before any of that happens, they and their AI pets are coming for your savings and the last scraps of any belief you ever had in your fellow human beings.
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